Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  Firefrost beamed at him, her young-old face suddenly wreathed in the wrinkles of her proper age - well over seventy. Smile-lines, mostly; Firefrost was a very cheerful person. “Very good! Yes, and I advise you to practice and learn to control this type of Sight in a safe place outside the Vale until you’ve gotten it well in hand. So many ley-lines come into the Heartstone in the Vale that you would be blinded if you can’t dim things down for yourself. And you’d have a headache for a week that would make you wish you were dead!”

  Darian was still conscious of that faint pressure of energy; he realized that he always had been, he just hadn’t known what to call it. “So this is why some places in Valdemar made me sick until we cleaned them up!” he said wonderingly. “That’s why Snowfire and Starfall would watch me so closely - they couldn’t feel where things had gone wrong, and they used me to find the places for them!”

  Firefrost nodded, and her approval warmed him clear through. “And you understand why they had to do that, don’t you? Or now are you feeling misused?”

  That was the last thing on his mind. He shrugged. “They didn’t have much choice, did they? I mean, they did have a kind of choice, they could have used dowsing or some other way to find the bad places, but it was so much quicker to use me - and besides that, it didn’t cost them anything in magical energies of their own. They wouldn’t have risked me if they didn’t think that we could all do what we did without any harm to me.”

  He couldn’t resent being “used”; not after the way he’d been vehemently angry with them over using up energies they could ill afford in order to accomplish things that he had been able to do at far less expense. He’d essentially offered himself for whatever need they had at that point, so there was no reason to resent the fact that they’d taken him up on the offer!

  “This - this form of the Gift that you have - is very similar to the Earth-Sense of some monarchs,” Firefrost went on in her low, age-roughened voice. “They can’t actually see the energies most of the time - not unless they are also mages - but they feel them. They can also feel what is wrong with the energies of their land at a distance, which can be very useful. The monarchs of Rethwellan have it, the highest of the Priests of Vkandis have it, the Son of the Sun Solaris has it, and the new King of Hardorn has it. In the King of Hardorn’s case, though, it was - imposed on him. With his consent - though I sometimes think he didn’t know what he was consenting to.” She raised an ironic eyebrow. “There is an ancient earth-religion sect of that land that still retains the full knowledge of the Earth-Taking ceremony, and has managed to give Earth-Sense to every monarch of Hardorn except the late and unlamented Ancar.”

  “Will I be able - Scratch that. I will be able to do what Starfall did about cleaning places up, but faster and more easily, won’t I.” He made it a statement, but was pleased to see Firefrost nod. “It’ll be like Healing for a Healer; instead of having to figure out what’s gone wrong, I’ll already know by how it affects me, and because of that I’ll know how to fix what’s wrong and get it right the first time, instead of fumbling around using trial and error.”

  “It will be quite natural to you - as will some other things, such as moving and acting in the overworld of mage-energies, once you’ve gotten the proper instructor. And you will be able to accomplish things I can only watch and admire, if you ever have access to enough energy.” Firefrost sighed. “Still, we all have our abilities, and - ”

  “And anyone who can reverse the effects of frostbite has no reason to feel self-conscious,” he replied, daring to interrupt her. “Any Healer can save what there is left of the damaged tissue, and so could most mages - but anyone who can restore and rebuild all the damage that has already occurred has nothing to be ashamed of!”

  That was how Firefrost had gotten her use name at the age of fourteen, when she was newly come into her abilities. While she was scouting the boundaries of k’Vala, a blizzard too huge to be steered away had swept across the forest and everyone who could was out scouting for those who might have been caught in it. She had been the only person anything like a Healer to come upon a family of tervardi taken by surprise by the storm. She had not only saved them from freezing, but had almost completely reversed the effects of the profoundly crippling frostbite (or “firefrost” in the Hawkbrother tongue) that they had suffered. By the time the help she had called for arrived, most of the damage was Healed, and no one suffered anything worse than a little superficial scarring at the extremities.

  “I sometimes suspect that the only reason I could was that I didn’t know I couldn’t,” his teacher said, only half in jest. “Still. . .”

  “Still, a little magic used with precision and at precisely the right time is better than a great deal of magic used sloppily and clumsily, too late or too early,” he said firmly. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that!”

  “Very well! The student rightly rebukes the teacher!” Firefrost laughed, throwing up her hands as if to fend off a blow. “Now, I would like to see if the student can evoke his Mage-Sight in the realm of the overwork without the coaching of his teacher!”

  “I hear and obey,” he said, bowing a little at the waist, and sent his mind down that peculiar “twist” that Firefrost had shown him.

  Once again, the world around him was overlaid with the overworld of energies. This time he had a kind of double vision, with the real world showing through the flowing energy-fields, and he decided to see if he could narrow his focus -

  Even as he thought that, in a dizzying rush that “felt” exactly as if he were diving off a cliff into the river, he found himself contemplating the life-forces of a single blade of grass. Except that he was far, far “smaller” in perception than that blade of grass!

  Oh. My. The slender stem loomed “over” him like one of the great trees of the Vale. As he gazed “upward,” his mouth falling open, he tried to take in the immense complexity of this seemingly insignificant bit of flora, and failed.

  I think my brain is overflowing! He tried to break free of the fascination and couldn’t - tried again and still couldn’t - and gave a wordless cry for help to his teacher.

  With another of those startling shocks, he found himself looking only at the real world again, from his proper perspective, and sighed with relief.

  “Next time, ask before you do something like that,” Firefrost told him sternly, crossing her arms over her chest, and giving him a harsh glare. “That was not what I asked you to do, was it?”

  “I didn’t know I was doing it until I’d done it,” he admitted shakily.

  She shook her head, the fine silver hair escaping from its braids with the movement and floating in fly-away strands about her face. “Now you see why you need a Healing Adept to teach you. It’s entirely possible that you could get yourself into something that I can’t get you out of! In the future, tell me what you think you want to do before you’re in the overworld, all right? With someone of your potential, a wish often becomes fact before you have the least idea what’s going on.”

  He felt very tired, all at once, and certainly he and Firefrost had put in more than enough work for one day. It had taken all afternoon before he’d learned that twist that brought him into the overworld. “Can we stop now?” he asked meekly. “I’m getting worn out.”

  Firefrost lost her stern glare and smiled ruefully. “And so you should be - and it’s my fault for letting you go back in when I knew you would be getting tired. Just run through those primary exercises I showed you, and we’ll go back to the Vale.”

  Now that he knew what they were for, the “primary exercises” in energy manipulation were far easier than they’d been earlier this afternoon, and he ran through them accurately, if not quickly. For the last one, he guided energy from the tree he sat beneath to a particular runnel rather than allowing it to flow into several as it would normally have done, and this time nothing escaped his “herding.”

  “Clean,” Firefrost approved. “Very clean. I couldn’t have do
ne it better. Let’s get ourselves back home, shall we?”

  He got to his feet and aided Firefrost to hers. She was as much Starfall’s senior as Starfall was Darien’s and, until Darian arrived, the only Healing-Mage that k’Vala had. She had greeted his arrival with relief - and pleasure, when she learned his potential.

  She was the kindest and most patient of his three teachers, although Starfall ran a very near second. If his unknown Healing-Adept teacher was half as easy to get along with as Firefrost, Darian thought that he would count himself lucky.

  The other teacher, Adept Darkstone, was much more difficult to like. He gave Darian his full attention, true, and was absolutely punctilious in giving Darian the most precise and accurate instructions, but it was all done without any feeling whatsoever. Darian still didn’t know a thing about Darkstone’s background, not even something so minor as which tree his ekele was in, and he’d been getting lessons from the Adept for a week.

  The one thing that he did know was the single thing Darkstone made clear at the very beginning; the Adept was entirely against the idea of working with Valdemarans in any way. He did not want outsiders in the Vale, around the Vale, or even aware that the Vale existed. He wanted Hawkbrothers to be a frightening presence in the forest, a glimpse of eyes in a shadow, the warning arrow out of nowhere.

  Darkstone wasn’t the only Tayledras who felt that way, though all the ones that Darian had met so far had treated him with distant courtesy at least. There was, after all, a tradition of Tayledras accepting the occasional outsider into their ranks and Clans. The thing that this particular faction opposed was the wholesale “adoption” of Valdemar on the same basis as the Kaled’a’in.

  Hard as it was to believe, there was even a faction that didn’t want the Kaled’a’in in k’Vala Vale! Their reasoning was a bit obtuse, along the line that “if the Goddess had wanted k’Leshya back with the Tayledras, the Goddess would have led them to us after the Sundering.”

  Useless to argue that this was precisely what had happened - if a bit later than they would have preferred. This lot no more wanted trondi’irn and gryphons in Tayledras Vales than they wanted Shin’a’in and their fighting mares in Tayledras Vales.

  Fortunately, Firefrost was as amused by them as they were outraged by her - and she had power and seniority in the Council over most of them.

  Even if she didn’t, she could probably reduce them to gibbering just by chuckling at them, tickling them under the chin, and telling them to “run along and learn to play nicely with the new children.” He began to see that there were a lot of advantages to age, some of them enough to provide compensation for losing some of the advantages of youth!

  In deference to Firefrost’s age, they’d ridden here on a pair of dyheli rather than hiking on foot. The two does had wandered off somewhere, but Kuari had kept track of one, while Firefrost’s snow-white peregrine had followed the other. Now, without prompting, the birds came winging back, flying under the level of the branches, while the dyheli does sauntered along behind at a brisk walk. Darian offered his linked hands to Firefrost; with a half-bow of her own, she stepped into them, and he boosted her into the well-padded saddle, then hopped onto the other waiting doe. Firefrost avoided the elaborate robes some of the mages - Darkstone for one - liked to wear, and the intricate hairstyles as well. Long, easy-fitting tunics and loose trews of silks in simple colors were what she preferred, and she kept her hair in two braids or a coiled braid at the nape of her neck. Today she wore green, with a necklet of rainbow-moonstones, a single white primary from her bird fastened into her braids.

  “The other day someone asked me why I hadn’t changed my name for a use-name,” he told her, as they rode side by side. “I told them it was because I felt like the same person. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Perfectly sound, good sense,” she replied with a laugh. “Really, Dar’ian, the reason we change our use-names in the first place is because the ones we’re given as children don’t fit us when we become adults. Think about the use-names for the children you’ve heard - Bluefeather, Littleflower, Honeyfawn, Jumpfrog - who’d want to be saddled with something like that as an adult?”

  “Huh - or as an adolescent!” he countered, from the lofty vantage of eighteen. “So how do people get their adult use-names? Yours was given to you, right?”

  “Yes, and if you manage to do something notable at about the time you’re ready for an ‘adult’ use-name, that’s usually what you get. Sometimes you get tagged with something notable that happens when you’re ready for a new name.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners with amusement. “That’s how Starfall got his - it was at a Midsummer celebration, and he’d climbed to the top of a cliff overshadowing the main swimming pool at the Vale we had back then. This was on a dare, you see - the usual male foolishness over a girl - and he jumped from the cliff into the pool at precisely the same time as an extremely bright shooting star flashed overhead, mirroring his fall, even to the same angle. So -’starfall’ he became and has remained.” Her eyes crinkled up even more. “And the funniest thing about it is that because he was diving at the time and had all of his attention on the dive so that he wouldn’t break his silly neck, he never saw the falling star that gave him his name!”

  “Steelmind?”

  “He never forgets anything, and proved it by reciting to one of the Elders a speech he had made that was precisely contradictory to the position he supported at that moment.” She laughed. “Potentially embarrassing, but he didn’t do it in public. Nevertheless, the Elder in question told everyone that the boy had a mind like a steel cage - nothing that got locked into it ever escaped.”

  Darian grinned. “What about Darkstone?”

  “His personality,” she responded promptly. “Pessimistic, unchanging, and cold as a stone. And believe it or not, he chose it himself. It was an affectation when he was young; he liked that particular aloof image. Now he couldn’t change it without more effort than he’s willing to put in.”

  “Wintersky? Raindance? Summerdance?”

  “All juvenile names; they haven’t gotten use-names yet, and their childhood names weren’t so silly they were in a hurry to lose them.”

  “Hmm. Would anyone label me with a use-name that I don’t like, but am stuck with?” He could think of a number of unpleasant possibilities.

  “People can try, but if you refuse to respond to their name for you, it’s considered good manners not to persist. You know the proverb - ’It isn’t what you call me, it’s what I answer to that counts.’ “ She nodded with understanding at his obvious relief. “As long as you feel you are Dar’ian and continue to respond to that name, no one will force you to accept another.”

  At this point he certainly couldn’t foresee ever wanting to take a use-name. Not even if I were to do something really impressive.

  “Do remember if you do take a use-name that, after you’ve had it for many years, it becomes a great effort to change it again,” she cautioned. “Usually something very dramatic has to happen before the change sticks in people’s minds. I can’t think of more than two or three people who’ve successfully gone to a new use-name later in life.”

  By then, they’d reached the entrance to k’Vala, and they discussed when and where they would meet for his next lesson. Once inside the Veil they dismounted and thanked the dyheli for their help; Darian escorted his teacher to her ekele, one that was quite low to the ground, by Tayledras standards. There he left her in the hands of her hertasi helpers, and decided to see if Nightbird or Snowfire and Nightwind had eaten dinner yet, as he was in the mood for some company.

  I’ll try Kel’s sunning rock, he decided. That always seemed to be the place one or more of them ended up.

  Since he was in a very good mood, it came as an abrupt shock to him to walk straight into the middle of a fight between Snowfire and his beloved. He simply rounded a curve in the path, walked out into the open near the group of boulders that several gryphons liked to use for sunbathing, and t
here they were -

  Oh-oh.

  “ - and no one is going to dictate whom I talk to!” Nightwind said, clearly and precisely, just as Darian stopped in his tracks. Her eyes, dark with anger, were the color of a thundercloud and looked just about ready to produce lightning. Her hands were clenched, her knuckles white, and her posture as stiff as an iron rod. For his part, Snowlake was actually white with rage, his eyes had gone to a pale gray, and his jaw was set so hard that Darian expected to hear his teeth splintering at any moment.

  It was even more of a shock to Darian since they were arguing in a place so very public. They’d argued before, even in his presence, but never where anyone could just walk into the middle of the spat.

  They were both using those sharp-edged, oh-so-civilized tones that meant they were really, really angry. They were both so caught up in their fight that neither of them paid the least attention to what was going on around them; he could have been a leaf, for all the attention they paid to him. Kel, wise young gryphon that he was, must have fled the moment the fight began.

  Darian was taken so much by surprise that he froze where he was - and it looked as though he wasn’t the only one who’d been caught off-guard and trapped by the altercation. Nightbird stood with her back to the trunk of a tree, looking very much as if she were bound there and not much caring for it, on the other side of the line-of-battle from Darian.

  “Look, I told you what he said - and to my face!” Snowfire said between clenched teeth, his face set, his eyes blazing with white fire. “He’s lucky I didn’t call him out in front of the Elders for it! That’s reason enough for you to avoid him.”

  “No, it isn’t. And who are you to choose my friends for me?” Nightwind shot back, matching him glare for glare. “I am not going to give up friends I’ve had all my life, just because you can’t get along with them! He was my scouting partner all the way from White Gryphon, and I’m not going to act as if he’s come down with spots just because you got your precious masculine pride a little bruised! You don’t own me, and the last time I looked, the Tayledras didn’t keep slaves!”